Intuitions, Rationalizations, and Justification:
A Defense of Sentimental Rationalism
Frank Hindriks
Abstract. Recent empirical research reveals that emotions play a central role in
the formation of moral judgments. Subjective Sentimentalists such as Haidt,
Nichols, and Prinz hold that affective responses provide the basis of moral
beliefs. They also maintain that such beliefs cannot be justified, and that moral
reasoning has little or no relevance other than maintaining our (self-) image as
rational agents. I criticize this view arguing that Subjective Sentimentalists
overgeneralize and fail to properly take into account the minority that is in fact
sensitive to arguments. I go on to discuss evidence concerning cognitive
dissonance and the role it plays in moral judgment. This evidence reveals that
affect and cognition interact in the formation of moral judgment. I present the
alternative that I defend, Sentimental Rationalism, against the background of
Moral Intuitionism. These two positions share the thesis that moral intuitions
can justify moral judgments. They differ in that only Sentimental Rationalism
takes affective sensibilities to be a proper source of moral judgment.
Acknowledgments. I thank Jochen Bojanowski, Joel Rickard, Sabine Roeser,
Hanno Sauer, Markus Schlosser, and Peter Timmerman for helpful comments.
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Intuitions, Rationalizations, and Justification:
A Defense of Sentimental Rationalism
People sometimes make moral judgments on the basis of brief emotional
episodes. I follow the widely established practice of referring to such affective
responses as intuitions (Haidt 2001, 2012; Bedke 2012, Copp 2012). Recently, a
number of moral psychologists have argued that moral judgments are never
more than emotion- or intuition-based pronouncements on what is right or
wrong (Haidt 2001, Nichols 2004, Prinz 2007). A wide variety of empirical
findings seem to support this claim. For example, some argue that arbitrary
emotional responses or intuitions induced under hypnosis elicit moral
judgments (Wheatly and Haidt 2005). Furthermore, intuitions function as the
point of last resort in attempts to justify moral judgments (Haidt, Björklund, and
Murphy 2000). On the basis of such evidence, psychologists such as Jonathan
Haidt (2001, 2012) and philosophers such as Shaun Nichols (2004) and Jesse
Prinz (2007) defend what I call ‘Subjective Sentimentalism’, which consists of
three claims about moral intuitions and the moral judgments they give rise to.1
The first claim is that moral intuitions are affective responses. The second is that
moral intuitions cause but do not justify moral judgments. And the third is that
Nichols (2004) and Prinz (2007) formulate their theories in terms of emotions
and sentiments rather than in terms of intuitions. The way in which these feature
in their theories, however, matches the way in which moral psychologists use the
term ‘intuition’ and how they conceive of their relation to emotions. Discussing
their theories in terms of intuitions facilitates an insightful comparison to other
positions.
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the attempts people sometimes make to justify these judgments typically fail,
because moral reasoning tends to be biased or confabulated.2
Around the turn of the nineteenth century, Henry Sidgwick (1874) and
G.E. Moore (1903) defended a position known as Moral Intuitionism.3 The notion
of an intuition lies at the heart of this theory about moral judgment, just as in the
case of Subjective Sentimentalism. In contrast to Subjective Sentimentalists,
however, Moral Intuitionists do not regard emotions as a proper source of moral
judgment. Emotions are too fickle to fulfill this purpose. According to Moral
Intuitionism, genuine moral intuitions are not based on emotions. Instead, they
are self-evident and require rational capacities to be appreciated as such.
Whereas Subjective Sentimentalists deny that moral judgments can be justified,
Moral Intuitionists affirm this. And they hold that moral knowledge is possible,
because reason provides justification for moral beliefs.
These two positions provide contrasting perspectives on intuition,
emotion, and reason, as well as on the roles they play in moral judgment.
Although I reject both positions, the alternative I defend draws on each of them. I
defend two claims. First, even though this kind of reasoning is often of poor
quality, the available evidence supports the claim that at least some of the time
moral reasoning provides justification for moral judgments. In other words, a
substantial proportion of the population engage in unbiased moral reasoning
and do not confabulate (see section 2 for a discussion of the data). Subjective
Sentimentalists over-generalize and fail to appreciate the significance of the
In section 1.1 I consider whether reasoning plays other more positive roles in
some versions of Subjective Sentimentalists.
3 See Ross (1930), Huemer (2005) and Audi (2004, 2013) for more recent
defenses of this position. Roeser (2011) argues that more than a century earlier
Reid (1785) defended a version of moral intuitionism.
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responses of the minorities in the empirical evidence they present. The second
claim that I defend here concerns the way in which moral reasoning works:
affect and cognition interact in the formation of moral judgments. This claim
derives support from experiments concerning cognitive dissonance. As it turns
out, an apparent cognitive conflict can trigger an unpleasant affective response,
which in turn motivates reasoning aimed at resolving the cognitive conflict.
Although such reasoning is often biased, there is no reason to believe that this is
always the case. The reasoning triggered by cognitive dissonance can in fact
provide warrant for the moral judgment that results from it, or so I argue below.
If it does, affect plays a constructive role in moral judgment. This implies that,
pace Moral Intuitionism, emotions can contribute to the justification of moral
beliefs.
As it combines elements from sentimentalism and rationalism, I call the
position that I defend in this paper ‘Sentimental Rationalism’.4 The central idea
of Sentimental Rationalism is that affect and cognition can contribute to the
justification of moral beliefs together. Others have criticized Subjective
Sentimentalism before, and Sentimental Rationalism is not the only hybrid
proposal (Fine 2006, Allman and Woodward 2008, Craigie 2011, and Sauer
2012a, 2012b). However, the evidence concerning cognitive dissonance and
moral reasoning presented in section 2.2 – Albert Bandura’s moral
Sentimental Rationalism is to be distinguished from Rational Sentimentalism.
Rational Sentimentalism is the view that values are constituted by sentiments
that are subject to rational assessment (D’Arms and Jacobson 2000). Sentimental
Rationalism, in contrast, is the view that affect and cognition can contribute to
the justification of moral beliefs together. Note that Rational Sentimentalism is
not restricted to moral values, but extends to (judgments about) non-moral
values. Sentimental Rationalism is not restricted to moral value judgments but
also encompasses other moral judgments including those about right and wrong.
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disengagement studies – has not yet been discussed in this context. And I use this
evidence to construct an account of how moral judgments could be justified that
is consistent with these studies as well as other recent empirical findings. More
specifically, I propose a normative theory of moral judgment in which the mutual
interaction between affect and cognition plays a central and distinctive role. This
theory is based on a descriptive account of moral reasoning to which I refer as
‘the Cognitive Dissonance Model’ (section 3). Before turning to the evidence
concerning cognitive dissonance, I critically discuss how Subjective
Sentimentalists invoke evidence concerning moral reasoning in support of their
position (section 2.1). I begin by introducing Subjective Sentimentalism and
Moral Intuitionism (section 1).
1. Intuitions in Ethics
1.1 Subjective Sentimentalism
Perhaps the most striking evidence in favor of Subjective Sentimentalism are the
hypnosis experiments mentioned in the introduction (Wheatly and Haidt 2005).
In these experiments, some connection is forged between morally irrelevant
words such as ‘take’ and ‘often’ on the one hand, and morally charged emotions
such as disgust on the other hand. Subsequently, participants read morally
neutral scenarios that contain the relevant words. As it turns out, they are then
inclined to say that the agent in the scenario did something wrong even though
they cannot explain why. Apparently, an intuitive response – in this case a flash
of disgust – is enough to trigger a moral verdict.
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I refer to these experiments as ‘the dumbfounding experiments’, as they
involve participants who are dumbfounded in the sense that they are unable to
back up their moral judgments with arguments when asked to do so (Haidt,
Koller, and Dias 1993). These experiments do not involve scenarios concerning
harm or rights violations but scenarios that are morally charged in some other
way. Examples are using a flag to clean a toilet, masturbating with a chicken
before eating it, and eating your pet dog that just died on the street in front of
your house. People have the intuition that these actions are morally wrong.
When pressed to defend their verdicts, they provide justifications that are
explicitly ruled out by the scenario, or they invent victims. And once they realize
that they have run out of arguments, they express their emotions, for instance by
saying that the relevant action is simply disgusting. Jonathan Haidt (2001, 2012)
argues that the arguments people provide tend to be biased or without any basis:
they commonly constitute rationalizations or confabulations.5 Haidt points out
that ultimately we are left with nothing but our emotions as a basis for the
judgment made. Reason functions as a lawyer of those emotions, and not as an
unbiased and objective judge.6
As I see it, the core of Subjective Sentimentalism (SS) consists of the three
claims concerning moral intuitions and the moral judgments they give rise to
mentioned in the introduction (here I present more precise versions of them).
Ever since Davidson (1963), philosophers typically take rationalizations to
consist of explanations that successfully explicate the reasons on the basis of
which the agent acted. In contrast to this, Haidt uses the term in a derogatory
way to designate bad or biased arguments. Confabulations are invented
arguments that have no basis in reality at all (see also Nisbett and Wilson 1977,
Wilson 2002, and Johansson et al. 2005).
6 Haidt’s (2012) Moral Foundations Theory encapsulates the claim that moral
judgments are based on emotions. According to his Social Intuitionist Model,
moral reasoning is mostly post hoc rationalization or confabulation.
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The first claim is: (1) Moral intuitions are affective responses (or dispositions to
display such responses). As Subjective Sentimentalists hold that moral intuitions
form the immediate basis of moral judgments, this implies that emotions are the
ultimate and only source of moral judgments. This means that rational thought
does not provide for an alternative or a complementary source. The second claim
concerns the question whether moral intuitions are justified or provide
justification for moral judgments: (2) Moral intuitions are a-rational in that they
cause but cannot justify moral judgments. The third statement addresses the way
in which people try to justify their moral judgments: (3) Apparent justifications
of moral judgments typically fail in that moral reasoning tends to be biased or
without any basis.
SS can be reformulated in the language of Dual System Theory along the
following lines.7 Intuitions are generated by System I, which means that they are
unmediated and a-rational. System II, the conscious planner or reasoner,
attempts to provide a justification for these responses, but is unable to offer good
arguments.8 The conclusion of those arguments is fixed beforehand, and consists
of whatever judgment happens to be supported by the intuitive response at
hand. Hence, rationalizations are always post hoc. Furthermore, the arguments
people provide in favor of their moral judgments are either biased or unfounded,
they constitute rationalizations or confabulations. Given that emotions are arational on SS, this could not be any other way.
See Evans (2008) for a review of Dual System Theories.
I follow Kahneman (2011) in talking about the two systems as distinct entities
without committing myself to the claim that they are more than analytically
distinct.
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In the introduction, I mentioned Haidt, Nichols and Prinz as proponents of
SS.9 All of them postulate an intimate connection between intuitions and moral
judgments. Prinz contrasts his own view to those of Nichols and Haidt by
pointing out that, on his view, this relation is not causal but constitutive (2007:
98-99). Both views, however, are consistent with SS. One might worry that
statement (3), the claim that apparent justifications typically fail, is not
underwritten by all three of them. Haidt has provided a lot of evidence for it and
endorses it explicitly. Nichols (2004) and Prinz (2007), however, hold that
reasoning has an important and constructive role to play, which could mean they
do not subscribe to claim (3). It will be useful to look at their views in some
detail and check whether the claim that they subscribe to SS needs to be
qualified in some respect.
On Nichols’ view (2004: 100-01), reasoning pertaining to moral
judgments primarily consists of reasoning about the content of the normative
theory. In addition to norm violations, moral reasoning can concern intentions
and consequences (ibid.: 103-4). Such reasoning can be pretty advanced, as it
often requires people to evaluate counterfactuals. The key question that
reasoning serves to answer on this picture is whether a particular action
genuinely violates a norm. As Nichols approaches it, this seems to be a factive
question. A reasoned answer to this question can provide warrant to the relevant
moral judgments. This reasoning does not, however, extend to discussions about
Nichols (2004) presents his Sentimental Rules Theory according to which an
affect-based normative theory provides the basis for moral judgment. Prinz’s
(2007) Constructive Sentimentalism is a subject relative form of sentimentalism
that focuses instead on individual dispositions to experience moral emotions.
Another difference worth noting here concerns the object of intuition. Whereas
Nichols holds that moral intuitions pertain to norms or principles, Prinz and
Haidt take moral intuitions to concern particular kinds of actions.
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the aptness of the norms or the appropriateness of affective responses, which are
genuinely normative matters. At this more fundamental level, then, warrant
plays no role. Statement (3) concerns this level. In light of this I see no reason to
doubt that Nichols subscribes to all three theses of SS after all.
Prinz (2007) argues that values are constituted by sentiments, which he
takes to be dispositions to display affective responses. Non-moral reasoning can
play an important role in his theory insofar as it serves to determine whether a
given value applies to a given case (ibid.: 124-25). Perhaps his theory even
allows for intrapersonal moral reasoning, as individuals might have to weigh
different values in a given case. On Prinz’s view, however, moral judgment is
subjective. He goes as far as to claim that, when two individuals form different
judgments, they do not disagree. Each moral judgment is after all relative to the
particular agent who makes it. There is no genuine inconsistency between my
view that it is wrong to eat your pet dog, and someone else’s view that it is
permissible to do so. Prinz’s subjectivism implies definite limits to the extent to
which moral reasoning can be warranted. All this means that, even if Prinz might
see reason to qualify thesis (3), he does not fundamentally disagree with it.10
Haidt (2012) might instead have problems with the second thesis of
Subjective Sentimentalism (2). On the one hand, he describes our affective
receptors as taste buds, which suggests emotions are a-rational and cannot be
There is in fact little room to maneuver here for Prinz. He rejects an analysis of
sentiments in terms of normal conditions for normal subjects (Prinz 2006,
2007). This means he cannot appeal to the conditions under which a moral
judgment is made in order to explain why it is wrong. Hence, the space for moral
error in Prinz’s theory is rather small.
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justified.11 On the other hand, however, he claims that emotions typically involve
cognitive appraisals of events that prepare people to respond appropriately
(ibid.: 44-45). This suggests that they can be rational. I do not know how to
resolve this tension. To the extent that this second feature of his position is more
true to Haidt’s account, his allegiance to Subjective Sentimentalism has to be
qualified just as some of my criticisms. Before turning to the empirical findings
adduced in support of Subjective Sentimentalism, I introduce Moral Intuitionism.
1.2 Moral Intuitionism
Moral Intuitionists such as Henry Sidgwick, G.E. Moore, and W.D. Ross have a
very different view of what intuitions are. Intuitions are not unconsidered
responses, but require reflection. An intuition has rational standing by definition.
Intuitions concern general moral principles such as the duty to keep promises.12
Moral Intuitionism (MI) can be characterized in terms of three claims that run
parallel to those introduced above for SS. Again, the first statement concerns the
nature of moral intuitions. Moral intuitionists take moral intuitions to be akin to
perceptions in part because of their immediacy. Moral intuitions appear in
someone’s consciousness, but there is no trace of any antecedents there might
Haidt clarifies the relation between emotions and intuitions as follows: ‘Moral
emotions are one type of moral intuition, but most moral intuitions are more
subtle; they don't rise to the level of emotions.’ (2012: 45) Later he adds that
‘most of our affective reactions are too fleeting to be called emotions’ (ibid.: 55).
In addition to appraisals, affective intuitions encompass alterations of attention
and vigilance (ibid.: 329n40). This is why I use the term ‘affective response’.
12 Audi (2013) hold that moral intuitions can also concern particular cases.
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be. This motivates (some) Moral Intuitionists to postulate a moral sense. (1)
Moral intuitions are due to a special moral sense: moral intuition.13
The evidentiary role of moral intuitions is made explicit in the second
statement: (2) Moral intuitions are typically warranted. They derive their
warrant at least in part from the fact that they are the intuitions of rational
agents. This second statement is diametrically opposed to the claim of SS that
moral judgments cannot be warranted, and are based on emotions rather than
reasoning. The third claim sheds more light on exactly how moral intuitions
provide warrant for moral judgments. (3) Moral intuitions justify moral
judgments non-inferentially.14
Moral Intuitionists regard moral intuitions as self-evident in a way that is
similar to the self-evidence of mathematical axioms. They provide the basis for
moral knowledge. The step from moral intuition to moral judgment is not a
matter of induction, deduction, or abduction on their view. Whereas a lot of true
moral statements bear logical relations to each other, some are special in that
they provide the foundation for other statements while they are not themselves
based on other statements. Moral intuitions are (typically regarded as) such
‘unmoved movers’. They form the foundations of moral knowledge, they are not
inferred from anything else, and provide independent warrant for moral
judgments.15
Not all intuitionists accept this thesis. Ross (1930) and Huemer (2005)
explicitly deny it.
14 Cowan combines statements (1) – (3) when he defines MI as follows: ‘Normal
ethical agents can and do have epistemically independent non-inferential
justification for first-order ethical beliefs that is the result of substantive ethical
thinking.’ (forthcoming)
15 At least contemporary Moral Intuitionists regard moral intuitions as defeasible
evidence for moral judgments (Audi 2004, Huemer 2005).
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Just as Subjective Sentimentalists, Moral Intuitionists are well aware of
the fact that emotions often form the causal basis of moral judgments. However,
they have a very different view of their status. They are hardly concerned with
what happens to cause someone’s judgments, if at all. Instead they ask what
should be the basis of moral judgments. Emotions form a distraction insofar as
this project is concerned, or so they maintain. Rational reflection provides for a
way of avoiding such distorting factors. The true normative theory is that which
survives rational reflection. Hence, Moral Intuitionists are rationalists rather
than sentimentalists.16
Even though SS and MI are very different views, it is useful to discuss
them in combination because we can learn from both. As discussed, MI holds that
intuitions are rational insights. SS maintains instead that intuitions are a-rational
affective responses. In section 2.1 I criticize SS for rejecting moral justification
and argue that it mistakenly dismisses reasoning as a source of moral
justification.17 In section 2.2 I argue that MI mistakenly rejects affect as an
appropriate source of moral judgment. This argument invokes research
concerning cognitive dissonance and moral judgment that suggests that
cognition and affect can contribute to the justification of moral judgments
together. I present my alternative, Sentimental Rationalism, in section 3. Just as
SS, it regards affect as a proper basis of moral judgment. Just as MI, it regards
intuitions as sources of justification.
Roeser (2011) forms an exception in this respect. According to her Affectual
Intuitionionism, the non-inferential moral beliefs that form the foundation of
moral knowledge are emotions. Audi (2013: 123-24) denies that affective
responses can be intuitions. He does, however, regard them as a source of
intuitions and he allows for the possibility that intuitions partly constitute
emotions (ibid.: 172 and 133).
17 See also Craigie (2011), Fine (2006), and Sauer (2012a, 2012b).
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2. The Evidence
The data collected in the past two decades or so has established beyond doubt
that emotions influence moral judgments in significant ways. Whether they do so
for better or worse, however, remains to be seen. The data as such does not
reveal whether emotions distort moral judgments, or whether they can serve to
justify them. The thing to do in order to make progress with respect to this issue,
I argue in this section, is to evaluate the role of emotion and of reasoning
together. This is in effect what Haidt does in the dumbfounding experiments
(section 2.1) and Bandura in what I call ‘the disengagement experiments’
(section 2.2). These experiments reveal that SS is too pessimistic about the role
of cognition and that MI is too negative about the role of affect. In section 3,
Sentimental Rationalism emerges as the synthesis that avoids the pitfalls and
combines the virtues of both.
2.1 Moral Dumbfounding
Haidt and his colleagues present those who participate in the moral
dumbfounding experiments with scenarios that concern harmless taboo
violations (Haidt, Björklund, and Murphy 2000). The underlying idea is that
people will be inclined to regard the depicted actions as wrong because they are
taboo violations. At the same time, it will be difficult for them to explain why
those actions are wrong because they do not involve rights violations or harm.
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These scenarios have been carefully constructed not to include rights violations
or harm.
In addition to the flag, dog, and chicken scenarios mentioned in section
1.1, Haidt presents a scenario concerning sibling sex. The brother and sister in
the story decide to commit incest. However, they expect to enjoy having sex with
each other. They decide to do it only once in order to be on the safe side and
avoid any negative consequences having sex with a sibling might have. As
expected, they do not experience any psychological distress afterwards.
Furthermore, they use contraception in order to rule out the possibility of
pregnancy. Hence, there is no possibility of a baby being born with birth defects
due to the genetic risks involved in having sex with relatives. After reading
scenarios such as this one, participants are asked whether the act depicted in
them is wrong.
Most people say yes. They are then invited to provide arguments for their
verdict. As it turns out, most answers are clearly beside the point. People raise
worries that have been ruled out in the scenario, such as that incest increases the
probability of birth defects. When it is pointed out to them that the problems
they raise are not there, people try to come up with other complaints. They go as
far as inventing victims, as when they suggest that the family would get sick from
eating their pet’s meat (Haidt 2012: 24). In the end, however, most people are
left with nothing else to say than that it is wrong but that they do not know why,
or that it is simply disgusting.18 Thus, they discover that they are unable to give
reasons for a judgment they thought they could justify.
Haidt, Koller and Dias (1993) distinguish four kinds of justifications:
autonomy, community, divinity, or norm statements. They regard appeals to
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In his attempt to explain moral dumbfounding, Haidt focuses on the role
that emotions might play in the formation of moral judgments. He suggests that
affective responses such as disgust trigger people to form the belief that the act
at issue is wrong. Subsequently, they put a lot of effort in making that verdict
look justified. Their reasoning functions, as Haidt puts it, as a lawyer of the
emotion-based verdict rather than as a disinterested judge.
The first thing I would like to point out in response is that if SS is true, it is
hard to understand why people engage in any moral reasoning at all. According
to SS, (basic) moral judgments are based on emotions and cannot be justified.
This leaves the puzzle of explaining why people would bother to adduce any
support at all. These people would be making a category mistake, if SS were true.
As moral judgments express sentiments rather than beliefs, they do not require
any evidence. It will not do to say that people simply feel the need to justify
themselves. People feel little pressure to provide arguments in defense of their
personal preferences (Haidt 2012: 44). In light of this, Subjective Sentimentalists
face the challenge to explain the following: if moral judgments are not
susceptible to warrant, just like personal preferences, why do people feel the
urge to justify the former but not the latter?19
The second thing to note is that there is more to the evidence than what
was mentioned thus far (Haidt, Björklund, and Murphy 2000, Haidt 2012: 3640). Some of the participants changed their view when they discovered that their
disgust as divinity statements, and claims to the effect that an action is wrong as
norm statements.
19 In a similar vein, Ditto, Pizarro and Tannenbaum (2009: 323) observe that
people feel more pressure to provide justification for moral claims as compared
to aesthetic claims. Their explanation is that, whereas aesthetics is usually seen
as a matter of taste, most people are native moral realists most of the time.
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arguments were defective. Rather than affirming the consequent and stating that
it is simply wrong, they reconsidered their view and ended up admitting that the
act was in fact unproblematic. These participants treat their inability to come up
with good reasons against the action as an indication that in the case at issue
there is no reason to forbid it. This observation reveals that Haidt overgeneralizes when he qualifies moral reasoning as post hoc rationalization and
confabulation. This is an important conclusion to draw as it opens up the
possibility that in each of these experiments a minority of the participants might
argue in a way that approximates that of a judge and is pretty far removed from
that of a biased lawyer.
In order to see how rash Haidt’s overgeneralization is, we need to
consider the minority that was not morally dumbfounded. Those who change
their mind tend to be people with a high socio-economic status (SSS).
Apparently, moral dumbfounding is influenced by individual differences
concerning, for instance, education and income. Another factor that matters is
time. More people change their mind when they are given the time to reflect on
the issue, or when they are presented with better arguments (Haidt 2012: 69,
Paxton, Ungar and Greene 2012). It is far from implausible that these factors are
systematically related to quality of judgment formation.
Daniel Batson and his colleagues (1997, 1999) have conducted research
concerning moral hypocrisy that also sheds light on which factors determine the
quality of moral judgments. Batson argues that people care more about
appearing to be moral than about being moral.20 This means that the quality of
Haidt makes a similar claim when he maintains that ‘we care more about
looking good than about truly being good’ (2012: 190).
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their reasoning depends on how easy it is to get away with flaws, and that
depends on circumstantial factors. People flip a coin, for example, to appear fair,
but ignore the outcome of the coin flip when they can get away with it in the
sense that the violation of the standard is neither too obvious to the participants
themselves nor apparent to others. Facing a mirror during the experiment,
however, turns out to make a difference. Looking in a mirror increases your selfawareness. And in contrast to the original setup, a substantial number of people
who face a mirror do abide by the outcome of the coin flip.
It may well be that circumstantial factors such as mirrors sometimes
serve to increase the quality of someone’s moral reasoning. The idea would be
that mirrors heighten self-awareness, which makes it more difficult to avoid
noticing the discrepancy between the envisaged action and the moral standard of
fairness at issue. As a consequence, the participant might no longer be able to
deceive himself into believing that the conflict is only apparent. The discrepancy
can plausibly be taken to trigger cognitive dissonance. It is relatively easy for lots
of people either not to notice the conflict, or to refrain from incurring any selfsanctions. Such moral disengagement becomes more difficult, however, when the
agent’s self-awareness is high. The upshot is that there is a range of factors that
affects the quality of moral reasoning and moral judgment. This provides reason
to doubt the second thesis of SS (2), the claim that moral intuitions are a-rational.
After all, to the extent that these factors do indeed bear on the quality of moral
judgments, there must be a measure of their quality.
The second thing to see is that, as soon as it is granted that moral
judgments can be justified or appropriate, it does not always matter much
whether people care only about appearing to be moral or whether they
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genuinely want to be moral. The important point is that in some circumstances
they will not get away with appearing to be moral without being moral, or
approximating the moral ideal. Factors such as SSS, heightened self-awareness,
and time to reflect, as well as the presence of others make it more difficult to
deceive others as well as themselves about the morality of their actions. Wanting
to appear moral will all by itself already have favorable consequences for the
quality of moral reasoning in some contexts.21 The upshot is that, pace SS, the
evidence concerning moral dumbfounding and moral hypocrisy supports the
idea that the moral judgments people form are or come close to being justified or
appropriate at least some of the time.22
2.2 Moral Disengagement
Moral disengagement facilitates people to do things that conflict with their own
moral standards. It typically concerns an action that an agent envisages herself
as performing that appears to be in conflict with her moral standards. The agent
is tempted to violate her own norms, but experiences anticipatory guilt feelings
about doing so. This affective response triggers a process of reasoning aimed at
Social psychologists distinguish accuracy, impression, and defense motivation.
Rather than about accuracy, agents sometimes care primarily about the image or
impression others have about them or about their self-image and whether it
remains defensible (Chaiken et al. 1996). In these terms, the argument presented
in the main text comes down to the claim that impression and defense
motivation sometimes have effects that are rather similar to those that accuracy
motivation would have.
22 This is confirmed by research concerning dishonesty. When people are in the
position to be dishonest, they behave dishonestly but only to a relatively small
extent. The line they do not cross is that beyond which they can no longer
maintain their self-image as honest people (Haidt 2012: 83; Mazar, Amir, and
Ariely 2008).
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double-checking whether the apparent conflict is genuine. Mechanisms of moral
disengagement are types of rationalization strategies people can use in order to
deceive themselves into believing that the apparent conflict is nothing more than
that, an apparent conflict that dissolves on closer inspection. Bandura et al.
(1996) refer to this process as moral disengagement because the agent
disengages moral self-sanction from possibly immoral conduct.
In one of the disengagement studies, the participants are prison
personnel from maximum-security penitentiaries (Osofsky, Bandura, and
Zimbardo 2005). These participants rate statements on a 5-point Likert scale
ranging from strongly agree (2) to uncertain (0) to strongly disagree (-2). One of
the statements is: ‘Capital punishment is just a legal penalty for murder.’ Michael
Osofsky, Albert Bandura, and Philip Zimbardo take this to be an example of
euphemistic labeling, one of the eight disengagement mechanisms that Bandura
distinguishes.23 They classify the statements ‘An execution is merciful compared
to a murder’ and ‘Those who carry out state executions should not be criticized
for following society’s wishes’ as advantageous comparison and displacement of
responsibility respectively (ibid.: 379). As it turns out, executioners employ all of
the eight kinds of rationalizations. Among the other participants in the study
were members of the support teams that provide solace and emotional support
See Bandura et al. (1996), and Bandura (1999). Four mechanisms of moral
disengagement pertain to conduct and its consequences: moral justification,
advantageous comparison, euphemistic labeling, disregarding or distorting the
consequences. Both displacement and diffusion of responsibility pertain to the
agent. Dehumanization, and attribution of blame pertain to the victim.
23
19
to the families of the victims and the condemned inmate. They are unlikely to
engage in dehumanization and moral justification (ibid.: 387).24
The executioners are expected to kill as part of their job. Experiential
reports reveal that they experience resistance to killing and that they manage
their thought processes in order to enable themselves to go through with it. Note
that, even if it were sometimes morally justified to execute prisoners, the extent
of moral disengagement as well as its content strongly suggests that many of the
facilitating thoughts are of mediocre quality at best. Even if they endorse these
claims, they should be able to see on reflection that they do not support the
relevant action. The thing that matters here, however, is that they help the agents
believe that, in spite of initial appearances, there is in the end no substantial
conflict between the agent’s norms and the envisaged action. The idea is that,
once the consistency has been established, the remaining obstacle for
performing the action has vanished and the agent goes ahead and carries out his
plan.
The disengagement experiments provide little reason for optimism about
moral conduct or about moral reasoning. The extent of moral disengagement,
however, is not uniform across the population. Factors that bear on the extent to
which people disengage include age, gender, education and race. Older people,
men, the lesser educated, and people from a Caucasian background are more
Agreeing or disagreeing with a statement is indicative of moral disengagement
only when the statement conflicts with the moral commitments of an agent.
Osofsky, Bandura, and Zimbardo (2005) do not measure such discrepancies
directly. They do, however, interview the participants and discuss their
emotional reactions in preparation, during, and after an execution and the ways
in which they tried to manage their stress (ibid.: 381, 389-90). To the extent that
their stress is indicative of cognitive dissonance, the interviews provide indirect
evidence in support of moral disengagement.
24
20
prone to morally disengage than others.25 These findings concerning individual
differences imply that some people are significantly more likely to behave in
accordance with their moral standards than others.26
Bandura’s moral disengagement theory is rather explicit about the
underlying mechanism. Although he rarely if ever uses the term, the mechanism
can plausibly be said to concern cognitive dissonance (Moore 2008). What is
fascinating about cognitive dissonance is that cognition and affect both play a
role in it in rather revealing ways (Festinger 1957). The mechanism concerns
agents who have internalized certain standards of rationality such as
consistency. Such agents use these standards to evaluate the actions they
consider performing. They register conflicts between such actions and their
moral standards. Those cognitive conflicts trigger affective responses. People are
susceptible to feel guilt prior to the act that clashes with their moral standards, a
feeling that is known as ‘anticipatory guilt feeling’. The term ‘cognitive
dissonance’ refers to anticipatory guilt feelings that are caused by cognitive
conflicts. As a consequence of this affective response, the agent initiates a
process of reasoning aimed at resolving the cognitive conflict in one way or
another. When it is resolved, the affect dissolves.
The conflict can, of course, be resolved by refraining from the envisaged
action. However, it can also be resolved by arriving at the conclusion that the
conflict was only apparent. And perhaps it was. The possibility to which the
As it happens, age is the only one of these factors that makes a difference in the
study just discussed (Osofsky, Bandura, and Zimbardo 2005: 381 and 387).
26 According to Aquino and Reed (2002), people can have a moral identity in the
sense that their moral standards can play a role in their self-conception. They
provide evidence that people who have a strong and accessible moral identity
violate their moral standards less often than others.
25
21
theory of moral disengagement highlights, however, is that in which some
mechanism of disengagement provides the agent with a new perspective on the
action such that it no longer appears to be in conflict with his moral standards
even though it in fact still is. The agent deludes himself into thinking that it is not.
The disengagement experiments suggest that people are rather good in
deceiving themselves, in mistaking bad reasons for good ones, when it comes to
moral matters. The driving force underlying disengagement is the desire to
maintain self-consistency. The preceding suggests that apparently maintaining
self-consistency is not so difficult for most of us.
How can a positive view on the formation of moral judgments be
defended in the face of such a gloomy conclusion? As in section 2.1, the first step
is to turn our attention to the minority. In contrast to Haidt, Bandura does not
overgeneralize, but is sensitive to the fact that different people disengage to
different extents. In Celia Moore’s (2008) terms they differ in their ‘propensity to
morally disengage’. In light of the findings presented earlier, it might be that
highly educated young women from a non-Caucasian background tend to have a
rather low propensity to morally disengage.27 The second step is to consider
what role cognitive dissonance might play in this. The account of cognitive
dissonance just presented is detailed enough to identify what I call ‘the cognitive
dissonance mechanism’ that proceeds from a cognitive conflict, to anticipatory
guilt feelings, to reasoning, and finally to moral disengagement. When people
with a low propensity to morally disengage notice a cognitive conflict, they are
likely to experience an affective response. However, they are less likely to fall
All we know is that the individual features correlate with propensity to
morally disengage. This can be true even if some combinations of these features
do not.
27
22
into the trap of any one of the disengagement mechanisms. And the arguments
that convince them, if any, are likely to be relatively unbiased. They will not
easily be satisfied with the thought that the conflict is merely apparent. The
upshot is that their judgments as to whether the envisaged action is in conflict
with their moral standards tend to be better than those of the rest of us.
Given this way of describing the differences between people with a low
and a high propensity to morally disengage, it is natural to conclude that moral
reasoning can serve to reduce or eliminate certain errors. This makes sense only
if moral judgments can in principle be justified. If this were impossible – as SS
supposes it is – moral reasoning would be pointless. Note that justification is a
matter of degree. A moral judgment can be more or less unbiased or justified.
And the discussion of cognitive dissonance suggests that the affective responses
people experience in reaction to a cognitive conflict can be rather informative.
They indicate that the agent’s cognitions might be flawed in some respect. This in
turn triggers a process of reasoning aimed at resolving the cognitive conflict.
An agent’s sensitivity to cognitive conflicts can be likened to a car alarm in
that it alerts the agent to possible flaws. Over time System II can fine-tune or
calibrate System I, just as a car alarm can be set such that it is appropriately
sensitive to genuine threats and not too sensitive in order to avoid too many
false alarms (see also section 3.1). The important point to appreciate here is that
cognitive dissonance involves interaction between cognition and affect that
serves to eliminate possible defeaters and to register evidence. Given how they
interrelate, cognition and affect are conducive to justified moral judgments. This
23
implies that a combination of informed affect and sound reasoning can give rise
to adequate moral judgments.28
Before I turn to the question how these insights can be used to construct
an alternative to SS and MI, let me comment on the kind of argument I have
presented in this section. In section 2.1, I presented what I will call ‘the argument
from overgeneralization’ in order to motivate an investigation of minority
responses in the dumbfounding experiments. A number of features were
identified that decrease the probability that an agent’s reasoning and judgment is
biased. In this section, I have discussed the cognitive dissonance mechanism and
I have explicated how it functions under ideal circumstances. The
methodological point that I have made is that differences in degree sometimes
provide information about processes that averages cannot reveal. More
specifically, minority responses can turn out to be a model for all in the sense
that they exemplify an ideal that others try to emulate. The thing to appreciate is
that, even though in quantitative terms the minority might be insignificant, it
may be that it should play a dominant role when it comes to conceptualizing the
underlying mechanism. I will refer to this second line of argument as ‘the
dominant minority argument’.
A dominant minority is a group that is only a small fraction of the overall
population but holds a disproportionate amount of power. Just as a dominant
minority has a lot of social power, the minorities involved in the experiments
discussed in this paper are rather revealing about the determinants of people’s
This line of reasoning suggests that it is too simple to think, as is often thought,
that System I is fast but unreliable, and System II slow but normatively superior.
Note also that on my view affect and cognition can each play a role in both
systems.
28
24
moral psychology than the majorities. Rather than social power, they have a lot
of explanatory power. This holds even if no member of the minority actually
reaches the moral ideal – for instance the ideal of never morally disengaging.
One may want to object to the dominant minority argument and point out
that the fact that people are climbing a mountain does not imply that they reach
the summit. Similarly, the thought would be, the fact that some of the time
people reason in an unbiased way does not entail that they acquire moral
knowledge or even that there is such a thing as moral knowledge. In response I
would like to point out that the fact that people are climbing does imply that
there is a mountain and that some people may reach a higher altitude than
others. This holds even if nobody reaches the summit. Suppose that the summit
represents moral certainty, and the slope of the mountain (the degree of)
justification. Disoriented climbers make little or no headway, if they do not loose
altitude. It may well be, however, that some climbers make progress. The
research discussed provides some reason to believe that there is altitude to be
gained and thereby reason to think that Subjective Sentimentalism is false. If it is,
we need an alternative.
3. Sentimental Rationalism
3.1 Emotion and Reasoning in Moral Judgment
Affect as well as cognition play a constructive role in the formation of moral
judgments some of the time. More specifically, both affect and cognition can
contribute to the justification of moral beliefs, and they often do so together. This
25
is the core thesis of Sentimental Rationalism (SR), the alternative view that I
defend in this section.29 Just as SS and MI were explicated in terms of three
claims above, I characterize SR in terms of three claims here. The first statement
concerns the nature of moral intuitions: (1) Moral intuitions are often affective
responses (or dispositions to display such responses). When someone has a
moral intuition, she will spontaneously regard some moral judgment as
compelling. It will often require effort to resist forming the relevant belief. This
may be due to an affective response. SR is more ecumenical than SS in that it
does not insist that all moral intuitions are affective. For all I have argued, some
might be intellectual rather than affective appearances (Huemer 2005), or even
self-evident beliefs, i.e. beliefs that are basic in that their content is not inferred
from anything else (Audi 2004). In contrast to (some versions of) MI, SR allows
for intuitions that are affective. Furthermore, it does not require recourse to a
moral sense.
The second claim concerns the rationality of moral intuitions: (2) Moral
intuitions themselves can be more or less warranted. This is in part due to the
fact that they are the intuitions of rational agents. The notion of rationality that
features in this claim is relatively undemanding. It requires people to be
disturbed by inconsistencies in their beliefs some of the time, and entails that
people can to some extent distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate
emotional responses. Note that this second statement is a restricted version of
the claim that MI makes about the warrant of moral judgments. It is restricted
because SR allows for a-rational and unwarranted intuitions of the kind SS is
See the introduction for other proposals that combine elements from
sentimentalism and rationalism. Note 4 comments on how SR relates to Rational
Sentimentalism.
29
26
concerned with. SR, however, does more justice to the moral sensibilities people
can have that provide them with input from the outside world. These
sensibilities serve, for instance, to register harm, or to indicate how appropriate
help would be.
The third thesis concerns the question how moral intuitions can confer
warrant on moral judgments: (3) Moral intuitions can justify moral judgments
non-inferentially. The relation between moral appearances and moral judgments
is non-inferential by definition. What SR has in common with MI is that
appearances can be warranted, and that such warrant can be transmitted to the
beliefs they give rise to. SR differs from MI in how it conceives of the justificatory
power of moral intuitions. In contrast to SS, SR does not regard affective
responses as a-rational.
In section 1.2 I noted that proponents of MI typically regard moral
intuitions as unmoved movers. SR rejects this view. Typically, the justification of
a moral judgment that is caused by a moral intuition does not only depend
directly on the warrant of that intuition, but also indirectly on past appearances
and reasoning processes and on how they shaped the agent’s moral sensibilities.
As a consequence, it will depend in part on other intuitions and beliefs. These
other justifying factors need not be present in order for the intuition to confer
warrant on the relevant judgment. And the agent need not be able to recount
them. The fact that intuitions have been shaped by normatively relevant factors
themselves, however, reveals that they are not normatively foundational in the
way they are often taken to be.30
Audi (2004) and Huemer (2005) maintain that intuitions sometimes have to
be discarded due to other intuitions with which they are compared in an attempt
30
27
Another difference between SR and MI is that some intuitions are, as I will
say, procedural rather than substantive. Substantive moral intuitions have
cognitive content, or they are representational appearances that can give rise to
cognitions. These are the intuitions MI is concerned with. SR acknowledges them
and maintains that at least some of them are moral emotions. Moral emotions
have affective and cognitive aspects ‘that cannot be pulled apart’ (Zagzebski
2003: 109). Some affective responses, however, do nothing else than indicate
that the agent should be alert and put more effort in forming a particular
judgment. The point of this is to draw attention to a possible distorting factor the
influence of which should be mitigated if not eliminated. Such procedural
intuitions have little or no cognitive content. They can, however, signal that the
agent should exercise her moral sensibilities more carefully, or that she should
consider more arguments for and against the belief she is inclined to form.31
At this point, the analogy between the cognitive dissonance mechanism
and a car alarm mentioned towards the end of section 2.2 becomes relevant. Too
many car alarms are too sensitive and go off in response to a loud noise or a gust
of wind. This discourages people from taking them seriously. It is, however,
possible to make a car alarm less sensitive. When the settings of an alarm are
changed accordingly, false alarms become rare. Now it makes sense to pay
attention to the alarm. In a somewhat similar way, one might say, someone’s
cognitive dissonance mechanism can be fine-tuned. This changes the agent’s
sensitivity to cognitive conflicts. Anticipatory guilt feelings alert the agent to
to achieve reflective equilibrium. This resolves at least some of the worries I
express in the main text.
31 Audi (2013: 155) acknowledges that emotions can contribute to the formation
of reliable intuitions. However, as mentioned in note 16, he denies that affective
responses can be intuitions.
28
possible flaws, but rarely when this is out of place and almost always when there
is a genuine cognitive conflict. The more the mechanism is fine-tuned, the more
justified the affective responses or moral intuitions are.
This idea can be developed in terms of Dual System theory (or more
generally in terms of more or less conscious responses).32 Over time System II
can fine-tune or calibrate System I. Consider Shy. Shy is very accommodating,
and is used to accept excuses from other people even if they are not particularly
good. At some point she notices that this way of responding is not very fruitful. It
seems that people just take advantage of her kind and considerate attitude.
Meanwhile Shy talks with friends who confirm her diagnosis. Over time she
becomes less timid and less compliant. She asserts herself more and begins to
radiate more confidence. People start taking her more seriously and are less
inclined to take advantage of her. This change of heart is facilitated by a change
in sentiment. As a consequence, she no longer turns inward, but becomes
annoyed when she notices others do not care about her feelings. In sum, Shy
acquires different sensibilities.
Presumably Shy’s initial shy responses are automatic and unreflective,
which means that they are generated by System I. They may, of course, have
been shaped by social norms and other people’s expectations. However, at this
point in time, Shy has never spent much time thinking them over. Over time she
becomes more conscious of her strategy of responding and of how inadequate it
is. Shy becomes particularly conscious of this when she discusses it with friends.
In this way, System II gets involved. She starts asserting herself more, which
See Craigie (2011) for another Dual Systems account of moral reasoning and
moral judgment.
32
29
initially requires conscious effort. For some time, System II regulates her
behavior in the relevant circumstances. Over time, however, her new way of
responding becomes habitual. In the end, no conscious thought is needed
anymore and her newly acquired attitude influences her behavior automatically.
Along the way, System I takes over responds without a need for deliberation.33
During this process, one might say, system II calibrates system I. System I
becomes more sensitive to inappropriate responses from other people, to
responses that indicate that they are about to take advantage of Shy. She comes
to recognize that this is not how it should be. She notices a discrepancy between
how she is treated on the one hand, and how she should be treated according to
her own norms on the other. This triggers an affective response, which in turn
prompts her to consider alternative ways of reacting. She settles on a reaction
that differs from what she used to do in settings like this one. Over time this new
way of reacting becomes habitual. At some level, Shy is aware of her improved
skills and learns to rely on them. Why think of this process as one of
recalibration? System I becomes more sensitive to particular circumstances.
Furthermore, System I starts associating the input she collects in those
circumstances to different behavior. In other words, not only the input, but also
the output that is linked to it changes.34
Fine makes a similar point when she argues that currently automatic
responses might be influenced by prior conscious reflection or reasoning (2006:
85 and 93).
34 This line of argument presupposes that each of the two systems has its good
and its bad side, a view that is defended, for instance, by Kahneman (2011). The
idea is that the heuristics of System I can be conducive to adequate responses in
some circumstances, and lead to biased responses in other. They can be quick
and dirty, but they can become more sophisticated over time.
33
30
Cognitive dissonance plays a central role in the process of change. When
Shy becomes aware of a discrepancy between how she expects to be and how she
believes that she should be treated, she becomes conscious of a cognitive conflict.
This cognitive conflict triggers an affective response. As she is not the cause of
the conflict, this response will not be one of guilt, which is the response involved
in moral disengagement. Instead she is annoyed by if not angry with the other
person. This affective response in turn prompts a process of reasoning. The
alternative courses of action that Shy considers differ in adequacy. She will be
looking for actions that might prevent the other from taking advantage of her or
that will discourage the other from doing so at future occasions. Shy might also
take into account how her reaction affects her reputation. She stands to gain
from an image of a more assertive person. Settling on a particular action can
resolve the cognitive conflict just mentioned, and pave the way to performing
that action. More often than not it will trigger the other to treat her properly. If,
however, she is not treated properly, she will find an adequate response to it.
Also in that case, the affect will dissolve. Note that, in order for System I to be
recalibrated in this way, an agent typically has to undergo a number of such
bouts of cognitive dissonance.
In order to connect Shy’s story directly to the earlier discussion on SS, MI,
and SR, it has to be retold in terms of intuitions. Although, in contrast to SS, SR
does not assume that intuitions are always generated by System I, it maintains
that this is often the case insofar as intuitions are concerned that are affective
responses. Shy’s intuitions will initially be fairly primitive affective responses.
Over time, however, her responses and reactions become more attuned to her
environment. For some time her new way of responding to her surroundings
31
requires conscious effort and deliberation, which means that it involves System
II. Due to practice it becomes ingrained. Once it has become automatic, Shy’s new
sensibilities have become part of System I. Along the way her intuitions acquire
more and more justification, as her responses to the environment become more
adequate. In contrast to SS, then, SR regards moral intuitions as potentially
justified. Shy’s judgments inherit any justification her intuitions have, as the
process by which she forms her moral beliefs involves the cognitive dissonance
mechanism that has been fine-tuned over time. Rather than being unmoved
movers, affective dispositions can be recalibrated so as to increase their
evidential significance.
3.2 Intuitions and Cognitive Dissonance
Shy’s story illustrates how significant the role of cognitive dissonance can be in
shaping people’s intuitions. It exemplifies what I call ‘the Cognitive Dissonance
Model of moral reasoning’. Formulated in terms of Dual System Theory, this
model has it that both Systems I and II play a role in generating reliable and
justified intuitions. System II plays a role as a standby ready to step in when
conscious reasoning is required. It is activated when System I registers an
irregularity that requires special attention.35 It might be that no such
irregularities are detected because no complex situations are encountered or
because System I is so well developed that it can adequately handle the
complicated situations it encounters on its own. At the same time, the probability
Craigie (2011: 67-68) defends a similar claim in terms of virtual control, a
notion she borrows from Philip Pettit. See also Clarke (2008: 809).
35
32
that it fails to alert system II when it is about to respond inadequately is very
small. This is the ideal case of the virtuous person who can exert his practical
wisdom without much if any deliberation.36
In more humdrum cases, System I will every so now and then notice
certain features of the situation that deserve more attention at which point
System II is engaged. In such a situation, conscious effort is required to come up
with a more adequate response. Although it not always does so, explicit
deliberation can increase the degree to which the response and reaction is
warranted. Note, however, that the fact that, when necessary, System II will be
engaged reflects positively on System I responses. More precisely, the extent to
which they are justified depends on the quality of its input/output settings.
Suppose that System II functions properly as a perceptive standby that takes
charge when it receives signals that indicate that System I functions in a way that
is suboptimal, which could mean it is about to make a mistake. If this were
indeed the case, it would confer further warrant on the agent’s moral
judgments.37
How can an intuition provide justification? Intuitions are generated
without the agent being conscious of any features that might justify the response.
When they give rise to a judgment, no occurrent belief provides warrant for it.
This does not mean it is not justified. Instead, it means that the justification it has
is indirect. The intuition points in a certain direction and thereby functions as a
signpost. The extent to which it is a good idea to travel in a particular direction
Sentimental Rationalism has affinities not only with Moral Intuitionism, but
also with Aristotelian virtue ethics.
37 See also Fine (2006: 90-92), who argues that controlled processes can
interfere with automatic processes, and that prejudices can in principle be
overcome in this way.
36
33
depends on the quality of the signpost. As an intuition is only as good as the
system that generates it, the quality of an intuition depends on the calibration of
System I. More specifically, it depends on whether System I is appropriately
sensitive to irregularities, and whether it provides the requisite signals to System
II so it can step in when necessary.
Detecting an irregularity can initiate a process of cognitive dissonance.
The affective response indicates that the envisaged reaction might be
inadequate. This triggers a line of reasoning that may resolve the conflict. The
dissolution of the emotion subsequently functions as a sign of coherence. Such
processes of cognitive dissonance can improve the quality of the agent’s moral
judgments. In part by means of explicit reasoning, the agent’s moral intuitions
can become more sophisticated over time, and the warrant that moral intuitions
confer on moral judgments can increase.
Intuitions, then, often function as indicators or proxies of reasons.
Although initially they were of little use, at some point Shy’s intuitions become
reliable and she can treat them as defeasible sources of justification. They tell us
in which direction we should think, or even which belief to form. And they can be
relied upon in this respect because they transmit the warrant of the reasoning
they are based upon. They will often involve emotions. However, this need not
always be the case. A response can be so habituated that it is simply retrieved
from memory without affective mediation (see also Prinz 2007). How do
intuitive responses compare to conscious processes of reasoning? To some
extent, intuitions or affective responses can be seen as a heuristic for conscious
thought. The distress I experience when I hurt someone – let’s suppose my elbow
accidentally ends up in someone’s stomach – and the empathic understanding I
34
arrive at almost automatically points me in the same direction as the thought
that I have harmed someone. I need to help the other or redress the pain I have
caused. At this point, it might appear that Systems I and II are perfect substitutes.
They do not need each other, and each can perform its task just as well as the
other. The only difference is temporal. System I is much quicker than System II
and functions as a shortcut for explicit reasoning. This conclusion, however, does
not follow. The two systems specialize in different aspects of judgment formation
and they need each other.
Earlier I argued that System I works well only if System II functions as a
standby. The thing to see now is that System II needs input and can acquire it
from System I. The quality of someone’s affective responses depends in part on
the agent’s reasoning capacities, both when they are engaged in a particular case
and when they play a role in the background. Intuitions sometimes function as a
substitute for reasoning, which is useful in particular when a relatively
unconscious affective response provides for quick input for action. I take moral
judgments to express cognitive attitudes that can be based on moral reasoning.
And even when they are based on intuitions instead, they can be insightfully
reconstructed as the conclusions of processes of reasoning. In light of this, I refer
to the position I defend as a kind of rationalism.
Sentiments do, however, play an indispensable role at least some of the
time. Moral arguments can be complex and moral judgments often require
balancing of reasons. Such balancing requires affective responses at least in
some cases. And affect might be required to even begin to realize that something
is wrong. Consider the example in which my elbow ends up hurting someone.
Perhaps I am in a hurry because I am going to see a movie together with a friend.
35
Presumably I have some duty towards my friend to be in time for the movie. How
this should be weighed in the situation or how it is to be balanced against the
harm the stranger incurs is not necessarily easy to determine. Perhaps mere
cognition will not do the trick. Emotional distress and empathic understanding
both with respect to my friend and to my victim may be required in order to
determine the appropriate weight of certain considerations. The upshot is that
affective capacities are indispensable. This is why the position I defend is called
‘Sentimental Rationalism’.38
All in all, intuitions turn out to provide quick responses that can function
as indicators for moral judgment. They give the agent a sense of which judgment
is correct, but leave her unable to provide reasons for the judgment she makes.
When she has developed her moral sensibilities, someone like Shy need not be
worried by this, as she can rely on her intuitions. Conscious cognitions, however,
are slow but propositional, and provide explicit justification.
SR portrays moral reasoning in a way that differs drastically from that of
SS. In particular Haidt paints a bleak picture of private moral reasoning as biased
and confabulated reasoning. In a sense, he argues that what is sometimes called
‘the game of giving and asking for reasons’ is mere play. On the basis of the
dominant minority argument in combination with new evidence concerning
moral disengagement, I have argued that this is often a serious game, not only
Haidt employs a rather broad definition of a rationalist as ‘anyone who
believes that reasoning is the most important and reliable way to obtain moral
knowledge’ (2012: 7). On this definition, a Sentimental Rationalist need not be a
rationalist, as it allows for emotions to be the most important and reliable source
of moral knowledge. SR also differs from the kind of rationalism defended by
Greene et al. (2001; see also Greene 2008) in that it does not regard reasoning as
a rival of emotion and rejects the idea that the former is bound to be superior to
the latter.
38
36
when you play it with others, but also when you play it with yourself, and not
only when you play it well, but also when your performance is mediocre.
4. Conclusion
Subjective Sentimentalism (SS) is mistaken when it leaves no constructive role
for reasoning to play. Moral Intuitionism (MI) is misguided when it depicts affect
as no more than a source of distortion. The synthesis of the most plausible
features of these two positions is Sentimental Rationalism (SR). SR ascribes a
positive role to both affect and cognition. Both emotions and arguments can play
a causal as well as a justificatory role with respect to moral judgment. Most of the
arguments I presented against Subjective Sentimentalism (SS) or in favor of SR
were based on empirical findings. I have presented the argument from
overgeneralization on which the data do not support the sweeping claims that
supporters of SS have defended on their basis. The second argument that I have
presented is the dominant minority argument. This argument serves to
appreciate that exceptions to generalizations can serve to point towards an
alternative mechanism on which moral judgments can be justified. On this
alternative picture, both emotional responses and arguments can contribute to
moral judgments together.
SR is a synthesis of SS and MI in that it transcends the oppositions that
they harbor. Rather than either or, it says: both reason and emotion. Instead of
always or never, it says: justified to a certain degree and only some of the time.
Due to the fact that it has so much in common with its rivals, relatively small
empirical peculiarities that can in some other cases safely be ignored turn out to
37
make a big difference concerning which position is supported. Just as SS, SR
recognizes that affective responses typically form the immediate basis of moral
judgments. It does not, however, go so far as to claim that they always do.
Similarly, just as MI, SR acknowledges that the rationality of moral agents
contributes in important ways to the warrant they have for their moral
judgments. It does, however, allow for other factors – in particular their affective
moral sensibilities – to contribute as well.
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